I’m sure you’ve experienced this after ending a diet. You don’t even think you’re eating that much more but you gain 3-4 lbs or more in the 1-2 days after finishing a diet from increasing your calories.
You don’t understand how you could have managed to gain that much fat so quickly, so what happened? It’s easier to understand what’s going on if we break down what happens whenever we significantly alter caloric intake.
How Your Bodyweight Changes Throughout a Cut
When you drop your calories (even if it’s an unplanned random day where you happened to eat a lot less than normal) you’ll usually see a noticeable drop in scale weight. Often the greater the caloric deficit the bigger the drop. Of course this isn’t the only factor that affects your bodyweight (includes fluid, salt, macros,food bulk,meal timing,stress etc).
None of this is muscle and very little will be fat. This also occurs the other way round. When you eat more (relative to what you were eating before) you can see an increase in scale weight after even 1 day.
This is another reason why people doing keto/some other low carbohydrate diet tend to notice big bodyweight changes after only 1/2 days of restricting/adding carbs back into their diet. Even when you keep your calories the same but decrease carbs significantly you can see a noticeable decrease in scale weight after only a few days due to water weight and glycogen (carbs).
How to Increase Calories After a Cutting Phase Without Getting Fat
During a cutting phase your maintenance calories will have dropped. Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) will have dropped and you’ll be carrying around less body weight and therefore burn less from calories from movement.
NEAT
In addition to these factors Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis or NEAT (calories burnt from movement that isn’t conscious exercise) will have decreased.
NEAT can be a significant amount of your daily caloric expenditure.
This is one reason why excessive cardio isn’t a good idea in most cases, your body may lower NEAT to compensate. So you could essentially be getting extremely diminished returns on cardio and be doing twice as much cardio for very little extra caloric burn.
Even though you’re doing significantly more cardio your body will compensate by reducing energy expenditure during other parts of the day. This NEAT includes how much you fidget and tap your foot, or how much you swing your arms when walking etc.
This will vary on an individual basis. Factors that also affect this include how aggressively/how long you diet for and what bodyfat you end up at. This does work both ways, i.e. the opposite tends to happen on a bulking phase.
Your body is attempting to maintain homeostasis. There is a range that your body prefers and it will alter various biological signals such as hunger when you start to move away from this range.
This range isn’t static and it seems to move , at least to some extent by maintaining a bodyweight/bf% outside of this range for an extended period of time.
New Maintenance Calories
So, what are your new maintenance calories?
We’ve established that they’re lower than they were before you started the diet due to the above reasons (unless you’ve also significantly increased your activity as well). They also won’t be as low as what you were dieting on as you were still losing weight then. Depending on how aggressively/long you’ve dieted for this range could potentially be very large.
I like to look at the average weight loss over the last 2 weeks of the diet and the average calorie intake over this time period. Then calculate a predicted maintenance from that, this won’t be perfect but should be pretty close.
There won’t have been much of a change in maintenance calories over 2 weeks and this is a long enough period for body weight fluctuations to roughly average out. Assuming the diet is at least 3 weeks long (3 weeks is still very short for a diet) this data won’t be affected by the initial drop in weight from lowering your calories. Now to throw some numbers in to give you an example.
Numerical Example
Before my most recent minicut my average morning bodyweight was just over 88kg (around 195lbs). At that time my maintainence calorie intake was around 3500-3600 calories. I dieted for 19 days at an average calorie intake of 2400-2450 calories. Roughly an 1100 calorie deficit from the start of my cut.
Over that period the total deficit was just under 21000 calories, there’s roughly 3500 calories in a lb of fat so this equates to just under 6lbs of fat in theory. In reality I actually lost around 5-5.5lbs of fat due to the drop in maintenance calories explained above. My average morning bodyweight in the last few days of my minicut was around 84.5kg (around 186-187lbs). This was a total bodyweight loss of just over 3.5kg (around 8lbs).
My strength was virtually identical to where it was pre diet (no/virtually no muscle was lost). I wasn’t completely depleted due to including some higher calorie days towards the end of the diet so these numbers make sense. This 8lbs consisted of 5-5.5lbs of fat and 2.5-3lbs of water, glycogen and food bulk in my gut.
2400ish calories was my AVERAGE intake, usually I start diets more aggressively. This is usually a better approach as you’re less hungry from coming off a surplus/maintenance. Because you’re coming out of a highly fed state muscle loss isn’t a concern in this timeframe.
After finishing this minicut I took 3300 as a conservative maintenance intake and ate that much on average for the next 11 days. I gained back that 2.5-3lbs I had dropped transiently and was averaging just under 86kg (190lbs) as a morning weigh in. This may have actually still been a very small deficit, but transitioning to a 2-4% deficit from around a 35% deficit isn’t really a big issue if you’re not sub 10% bodyfat (which I wasn’t)
Rationale for Conservative Caloric Increases
TECHNICALLY I may still have been dieting (albeit extremely slowly), however going from a huge deficit to such a small one makes you feel like you’re at maintenance. It’s such a small deficit for such a short period of time that I don’t see it causing any issues unless you’re getting extremely lean. Extremely lean meaning legit single digit body fat.
If you do end your diet that lean then maybe don’t be conservative and add an extra 5-10% on top to ensure you’re definitely not in a deficit.
Over this period I didn’t seem to gain any fat, if anything I looked like I maybe even lost a very small amount more. I would have seen a small increase in my maintenance from the increase in NEAT and RMR. At this point it made sense to bump up calories about 5% (150-200 cals) to slowly gain from this position until I stopped seeing any noticeable increase in average weigh ins over a 2-3 week period. Then it would be time for another small increase and this process could be repeated as long as I’d like to continue gaining.
I’ve seen many people overestimate their new maintenance immediately after a diet due to restoring glycogen. They may be eating in a surplus and not really tracking their weight frequently. In this situation they won’t really look like they’re gaining body fat as most of those surplus calories are just being used to refill muscle glycogen, they may even look better because of this.
Then all of a sudden you start gaining body fat without increasing calories and because you thought you were at maintenance it just sort of snuck up on you.
It’s just like what happens when you start a diet, for a period of time you look more skinny fat as you haven’t lost enough fat to look lean but you’re smaller and flat from depletion.
I’m sure it’s pretty common to not want to lower calories on a bulk. I’d rather stay at a certain caloric intake than have to lower it because the surplus was too large while bulking. This is why in the vast majority of situations I prefer to start a bit conservatively which prevents gaining weight too fast. You can’t put on muscle very fast naturally unless you’re a complete beginner anyway.
More advanced drug free lifters will do very well to gain 3-4lbs of pure muscle in an ENTIRE YEAR which equates to a tiny caloric surplus, so small you can’t even really measure it. This is why I prefer to gain as slowly as possible while still being able to see slight increases in scale weight every 2 weeks or so just from a practicality standpoint.
Mindset after a Cut
Your mindset after finishing a diet is critically important. It will make or break how fast you gain fat after the diet is finished.
People don’t struggle that hard to lose weight, they struggle to keep it off after the diet has finished. When you’re dieting the mindset you employ is one of restriction and focusing more on eating “cleaner” more filling foods.
It may actually be easier to resist tasty calorie dense foods when you’re deep into a cut at a 20%+ caloric deficit compared to being on maintenance when your calories are higher.
You’ll be less hungry at maintenance and be able to eat MORE but since you aren’t focused on that goal of eating cleaner and losing bodyweight you may find being restrictive more difficult.
This is also a reason why flexible dieting may not be for everyone, sure you can have ice cream and pizza and still lose weight fairly quickly. The issue is that these foods won’t fill you up nearly as much as something like grilled chicken and vegetables and you may be feeling way hungrier than you could be for the extremely short lived pleasure from these foods.
In addition many people find that when they’ve “broken the seal” they crave these foods even more. Now you find yourself in a place where you’re hungrier and craving more food despite being able to eat much less which isn’t a fun situation to be in.
Some people won’t be affected by this as much and may have no issue with adherence after having some “junk food”. However for many people I find that the trade off is usually not worth it during what should be a relatively short dieting phase in the grand scheme of things.
The Diet After the Diet
In most situations I think it’s wise to adopt the dieting mindset for at least a few weeks after you’ve finished your diet. If your goal is to build a lot of strength and muscle you should spend most of your year at maintenance/a small surplus anyway. In most cases I don’t think staying in the dieting mindset for slightly longer will add much mental stress.
As I’ve touched on above, immediately after finishing a diet I would hold back on stuffing yourself with extremely tasty foods, at least a little bit. In this extremely hungry state, it’s very rare to not gain weight faster than you’re intending in my experience. If you try to maintain you’ll probably slowly bulk and if you try to slowly bulk you’ll probably bulk quickly even if you think you’re tracking calories reasonably well.
An approach that I like to use is to increase your calories up to around maintenance/a very small deficit utilising almost the exact same foods you’ve been dieting on, just in greater quantities.
You can add foods that are slightly higher on the palatability scale (tastier) intially, but I wouldn’t add too many of them. Then in the next several weeks you can add even tastier foods after your hunger levels have decreased, your maintenance calories have increased slightly and diet fatigue has pretty much fully subsided.
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